Acoustic pulse reflection at a time-reversal mirror

To investigate the physical properties of fields reflected by time-reversal mirrors, one resorts to a gedanken experiment where a mirror realizes exactly the time inversion of the incident field. Working with incident rectangular and windowed harmonic pulses and using an integral equation approach recently developed to deal with scattering from obstacles, the reflection of plane and spherical pulses on time-reversal mirrors is analysed. It is proved that according to the form of the incident field, such mirrors may be transparent or behave as a dual source of pulses propagating in the opposite direction to incident pulses.